"Embodied Cognition" -- empirio-criticism rides again

An article in Scientific American on "Embodied Cognition" prompted a commenter to declare: "The phrase "embodied simulation" is confusing." I agreed and added the following comment as a rider to a previous comment I made referring to Lenin's book on empirio-criticism:

jayjacobus is right about the confusion. There's an interplay between reality and perception of it, and perception itself is a reality, so we have perceptions of perception. It's like consciousness and self-consciousness, and this relationship has been a central problem for philosophy. One of the most primitive responses has been to invent a previous cause, and stop the infinite regression by calling some given cause final or ultimate or prime or whatever. This "embodied simulation" nonsense is the same kind of thing - what it doesn't do is answer the question of reality, ie what is being simulated.
This is a philosophical perpetuum mobile that pretends it isn't. 
Now Kant was smart, so he stopped his infinite regression pain by claiming that the ultimate ground for everything was ultimately unknowable, which was the agnostic thing to do. Hegel was smarter but far less diplomatic, and said "look, reality and our perception of it is full of contradictions, live with it", and moved beyond Kant, opening the way for Marx to move beyond the whole supernatural 'perception/consciousness/thought first' approach. 
For empirical beings, we are very attached to abstract ideas. The reason is simple - we process continuous empirical reality including ourselves using discrete abstract reflections of it in thought. So if you want to call this processing 'simulation', be my guest. Ditto if you want to be empirical by calling it 'embodied'. Well done. Which leaves us as bodies that think. Square one.
Moving in a world of discrete, abstract reflection our mirror minds naturally assume everything is discrete and abstract as soon as it thinks about it, except that the basic presupposition for our survival in reality is concrete continuity. And since survival is opportunistic and iconoclastic, we survive in reality at the expense of broken intellectual dogma, icons and fetishes. 
This drama is entertainingly embodied for me in Lucretius's great Latin poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), and in Hegel's two great works The Phenomenology of the Spirit and The Science of Logic. These are guaranteed pre-Marxist so clear of any ideological tarring and feathering that anything written after 1848 might risk. For a scientific mind they are immensely rewarding, and even a short dip is very invigorating!

Hidden curriculum and philosophical teaching

An article in the Guardian Teacher Network discusses the problem of bringing a philosophical approach to teaching, in contrast to "teaching to the test".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2012/aug/14/philisophical-teaching-students

I commented:

Schools are an institution to socialize children and make them ready for the role allocated to them by society. This is a massive matter operating on a massive scale. The working class is huge, and schools are there to refresh it - not to make self-employed creatives or employers or administrators of all the kids. 

Traditionally, independent and critical thought is not required of workers or the poor, and as someone says here, it fails to recognize the barriers society wishes to keep in place, so it is liable to cause more problems than it's worth if it is instilled and encouraged in education.

So independent thought runs slap bang into the wall of Philip Jackson's Hidden Curriculum. The glass ceiling keeps women from rising in society, and the glass wall of the hidden curriculum keeps working class kids in their parents' factories, offices and dole queues.

The corollary of the hidden curriculum for teachers (education workers in general) who want to see it gone is the Double Curriculum. That is, we (I was in this game for twenty years, in a difficult school in a deprived are, goes without saying really) have to work both to the official curriculum and the liberating curriculum. 

Most, that is MOST, teachers won't even be aware of this, let alone contemplate undertaking such a project. And for a lot of teachers attempting it, the result will be burn-out - it's just as frustrating to bang your head against a glass wall as a brick one.

The solution is to organize publicly and politically against the hidden, reactionary curriculum - get it out in the open. Work for a programme of educational change incorporating all the effective learning methods mentioned here and in other discussions within a programme of changing society so that all people will have guaranteed meaningful employment with a guaranteed democratic say in managing their work and everything connected with it. In this way learning and work will become meaningful, not just spiteful hostile abstractions, and the activities of learning and working will be performed with pleasure and a satisfaction we rarely see today.

This is the only realistic way to better education for everyone. If the political and social perspective is set aside, we'll just see a repetition of the vagaries of education policy over the past century in Britain and other developed industrial countries (ie imperialist countries, like Sweden or the USA).

Utopian corners of good educational practice can and will exist meanwhile, of course, and provide a growing list of excellent examples to learn from... but cultivating a tiny model garden in an industrial wasteland will never satisfy a truly independent and critical mind. It's the wasteland that needs transforming.